This watchdog blog, by journalist Norman Oder, offers analysis, commentary, and reportage about the $4.9 billion project to build the Barclays Center arena and 16 high-rise buildings at a crucial site in Brooklyn. Dubbed Atlantic Yards by developer Forest City Ratner in 2003, it was rebranded Pacific Park in 2014 after the Chinese government-owned Greenland Group bought a 70% stake in 15 towers. New York State still calls it Atlantic Yards. Contact: AtlanticYardsReport[at]hotmail.com

This morning, as shown in the video below, a truck was waiting on playground Dean Street east of Sixth Avenue opposite the Dean Street playground, thus slowing the passage of traffic and making it very tough for a bus to proceed.

Some 15 minutes before the video was shot, photographer Wayne Bailey told me, he asked the driver why he was parked there rather than the staging area on Pacific Street. The driver indicated he driver understood the location of the staging area.

When Bailey returned, traffic had slowed as the bus stopped, waiting for the truck driver to fold in his mirrors to allow the bus to pass through. He reminded the driver he was supposed to stage the vehicle around the block. The response was that the entrance was "locked."

Indeed, construction is supposed to start at 7 am. But there's no apparently no provision to accommodate drivers who get there early. Nor are there personnel to ensure this doesn't happen.

After the NBA draft

On midnight Thursday 6/23/16, four trucks involved in the load-out after the NBA Draft at the Barclays Center idled illegally for more than three minutes at the corner of Pacific Street and Sixth Avenue.

Two trucks were on the south side of Pacific facing east, while two were on Sixth below Pacific, facing north. People live very nearby and a new residential building (670 Pacific) should open later this year. And by 2020, it seems, a new tower (664 Pacific, with school) will open behind the construction fence where those trucks were idling.